Chingu Cohorts: Free Group Projects With Other Web Development Students

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Right before I started studying at Thinkful, I participated in a Chingu cohort. It’s a collection of group projects that you can participate in for free while you’re learning to code. It’s a great idea, and I can’t even imagine how much work must go into putting something like this together.

In this post I’ll discuss what it was like and if I’d recommend it for other people learning web development. I also feel like most people probably don’t know about it so I wanted to spread the word. 😀

I actually had some trouble finding comprehensive documents to link to with all of the details so I’ll mostly be referencing the Chingu handbook and my own experience.

How It Works

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To participate in a Chingu cohort, you can apply on their website to one of four cohorts:

• Penguins (back-end, part-time or full-time)
• Red Pandas (front-end, full-time)
• Cheetahs (data-science, full-time)
• Flamingos (front-end, part-time)

They’ll get in touch with you to let you know you were accepted, and then there’s a bit of an on boarding process to get you set up. There were some other projects available that I didn’t participate in, such as groups that are working through freeCodeCamp together.

Applicants are split up into smaller groups based on goals and experience (we had four people) and invited to the various slack channels that Chingu has. The main channels I used were the ones to ask general coding questions, and the channel for my specific group.

One of the first tasks is to decide on the tech stack and project to work on. Chingu provided a list of projects that we could pick as a good starting point. We decided to clone the site Jobbatical. Here’s a post showing the recommended projects for a more recent cohort.

After picking a project, we worked as a group to lay out our goals in a kanban on GitHub, and then claimed the tasks that we wanted to work on. Then we just had to code our way to victory! ✊

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Less Victorious Than We Hoped For

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Getting everything set up was great, and it was fun talking to the group members, but things didn’t go quite as planned. This isn’t too surprising for a free project like this — none of us had any financial stake in completing it — but as we progressed a couple people dropped off the map. It was great how much work people were putting in initially, but it slowly died off as the project progressed.

For me, personally, the biggest problem was my own ability level and what I volunteered to work on. I decided to work on building out the front end in React, because we had two other guys that wanted to work on the back end, and one that wanted to work on React stuff. The problem was that at this point I had zero experience with either Node or React and was planning to just learn as I went.

This seemed fine in theory, and I’m sure some people can be more successful in this approach, but for me it was just frustrating. I wanted to come through for the group, but trying to just dive into the code and learn as I went didn’t prove very successful. I took some time to start going through a couple courses, but this led to my updates to the group basically being: “I worked on a course.”

So the project slowly fizzled out, but there were no hard feelings. The one person who stayed around until the end with me ended up putting most of the site together, and we had a skeleton of a site to hand in at the end of the 5 week program.

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What I’d Do Differently

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If I were to do this over again, I would either sign up for a lower level group, or wait until I’m more familiar with React and Node and sign up for the full-stack project again. I definitely learned a lot from the experience — in particular I got a much better grasp of how to manage a group project through Github — but in the end it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped it would be. I think it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t a school meant to teach you to be a coder, it’s just a support system. And this is part of the reason why I decided to enroll in the Thinkful program. 🙂

Conclusion

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Overall, it was a great experience with some drawbacks, mostly based on my ability level at the time I participated. It’s awesome that someone is putting in the time to make this available for free, and I will consider enrolling again in a couple months if I’m looking for some more group experience.

Thanks for reading! If you know of any similar programs like this, please let me know in the comments! 👍

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